Pudding Seminar: Yan-Yi Lee (MCR), ‘Do Different Languages Train Our Brain in Different Ways?: Revisiting Bilingualism and Cognitive Development’

It has been widely confirmed that bilingualism brings us several cognitive advantages. However, would the specific languages we choose to learn train our brain to develop different cognitive benefits over time? In light of this relatively new area of inquiry, this talk explores how the linguistic design of a second language (e.g. writing systems, phonetics, syntax complexities) and its typological distance from our first language could possibly shape our cognitive development in various dimensions.

Yan-Yi Lee is a first-year Ph.D. student at the Faculty of Education. Her research interest lies in the strategic learning of linguistically distant languages as well as how multilingualism fosters cognitive development. Prior to coming to Cambridge, she worked at the U.S. Linguistic Data Consortium and the ETS in Princeton. She has also taught languages and linguistics full-time in a Taiwanese university.